


darkness in the light

by sinkingsidewalks



Series: i want to be able to love you (without it hurting this much) [3]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Angst, F/M, I've probably gotta stop apologizing in the tags, Miscarriage mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 14:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14792529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: Tessa stares at the black and white grainy print out of a sonogram and thinks about the wordoptions.





	darkness in the light

**Author's Note:**

> Here's some Tessa after all that Scott. This refused to be written sequentially and I hope that it makes sense/is clear, I don't have a ton of practice with non-linear.  
> This is a work of complete fiction.

Tessa stares at the black and white grainy print out of a sonogram and thinks about the word _options._

She thinks about her work schedule and her husbands. About being panicked and sixteen, peeing on a stick and thinking only about skating. About Scott with his daughters, one riding his shoulders, the other hanging off his back. 

She thinks about the spot in her heart that she’s carved out and tended after for the son that was never born and how it doesn’t feel like it’s slowly eating away at her whole being anymore. 

She thinks about being almost thirty-five. 

Then, she doesn’t think at all. For once, she does what Scott always tells her and just _feels_.

She unlocks her phone and passes it between her hands, with her bottom lip caught between her teeth. The house is eerily silent. She nods to herself and presses call. 

“Mom?” she whispers feeling her words broach into the daylight. “I’m gonna have a baby.”

 

The Thursday morning his daughters are born she hears about it through the grapevine. She stands stock still in her kitchen and watches the dust motes float in winter sunshine. It’s only February.

“Are they?” she asks her mom, who heard from Sheri who got a call from Alma, on the phone flicking shut a kitchen cupboard. She’s so not hungry anymore. 

“Healthy,” Kate answers immediately. “Both girls.”

She breathes a sigh of relief. It’s all she’s ever wanted for him. 

“Twins are usually early.” Kate reminds her and Tessa hums along agreeably, quickly ending the call. 

It doesn’t bother her that he didn’t tell her himself. They’ve started talking on the phone every Sunday afternoon, casually, focusing on stuff happening at the rink and their families. He doesn’t talk about the pregnancy, only mentions Julie here and there. She doesn’t know if it’s because he doesn’t want to hurt her, or if he himself can’t talk about another child with her. 

They’re supposed to skate later next week, out of nostalgia for the best skate of their lives, and she mentally writes it out of her calendar. He’s got daughters now, the notion is still largely abstract to her, but they need him more than she does. 

She goes into her bedroom and opens up the bottom drawer of her bedside table with the little key from under her jewelry box. She stares at the contents. 

Five Olympic Medals. Two Engagement Rings. 

In Montreal they’d been on display. In part due to hubris, (though they’d worked damn hard, thank you) but also because the sight of ten Olympic medals all together brings about a certain giddy, childish, happiness. It had been nice to look over and know their dreams were achievable.

Now, they’re still a little hard to look at. Everything that relates to him is. It’s all drops in the river of pain that flows through her. She’s only just barely learned how not to let it drown her. 

When she first moved back she’d had to box up the piles of his things left lying around and leave them with Joe. Joe, not Alma, she’d called ahead to make sure she wasn’t home, because Tessa still hadn’t been able to look his mother in the eye. It had been agony. Worse than the two-day deconstruction of their home in Montreal. 

At least there Scott had been in it with her, and however much his pain doubled hers, it had also been comforting as well. When she’d gotten back to London, she’d walked around, alone, and pulled away all the things that were too strongly his. By the end, the house had been pretty bare. 

Tessa takes out the engagement ring not The Engagement Ring (that one she hasn’t touched since she pulled it off her finger) and creaks open the box. It’s exactly as she remembers when he offered it to her with a candlelit dinner and a walk through the park at sunset. A princess cut diamond in the center, four smaller ones cluttering around it, all on a platinum band. 

_Don’t give me an answer right now_ , Marcus had said. She’d agreed to think it over. He’d left for New York. 

She puts the ring on. 

After relocking the drawer, she texts him _Congratulations!!_ and adds a red heart, then deletes it. No, the pink one with the stars. Two.

The diamond puts a rainbow on the wall. 

 

Scott sticks the sonogram print outs on the fridge, each one under a magnet he picked up at a tacky souvenir shop in this country or that from all their travelling over the years. They add up until there’s no space on the door left. Then they get another, and he reshuffles to find room. 

“What are you gonna do when they’re born?” She asks one morning, smiling, as he swears when he knocks week ten under a cherry blossom tree magnet from Japan to the floor on his way to the milk. 

He picks it up and with utter seriousness says, “We’re gonna need a bigger fridge.”

 

Marcus is absolutely thrilled when he gets home from Halifax. He’s an only child and he’s always wanted kids. She was the driving force of their absence, the shake of the head, the _it’s not the right time_ , for the last five years of their marriage. 

When she tells him he hugs her tight and kisses her softly and thanks her for the best homecoming gift _ever_. 

She bites her lip but doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t given him anything yet.

After Marcus, she tells Jordan and Scott, because she owes him that much, and absolutely no one else. Even once she’s showing. She knows it’s irrational, but she can hardly say the word. It’s like all of her competition superstitions from their teenage years. She knows she won’t actually jinx it, but _what if she does?_

Despite her worry, everything goes fine. Her morning sickness sucks, but it’s not terrible. They run genetic testing and it all comes back normal. Every ultrasound hits all the benchmarks. 

Week sixteen passes and she’s still pregnant. What she feels isn’t quite relief. 

 

The first Sunday of the Moir twins’ little lives Tessa’s phone rings at ten fifteen at night when she’s trying and failing to sink into a reread of _Pride and Prejudice_. She didn’t expect it to. She heard (again through her mother and his cousin and brother) that Scott and Julie brought the girls home that morning. She’s been studiously trying to ignore the thoughts of a different morning and a different hospital. 

She picks up after the second ring and says quietly. “Hey.”

“Hey, T.” His voice is soft, almost whispering over the line, but it doesn’t lessen the emotion she can hear. He sounds tired but content and _happy_. Like early mornings in the middle of a good week of training. The sun isn’t up yet, but he’s still warm. 

She listens to three of his evenly spaced breaths. 

“How are they?”

“They’re-“ he chokes on emotion and she realizes her eyes are wet too. “They’re _perfect_ , Tess.”

She swipes away her tears. “I’m _so_ happy for you, Scotty.” And she is. This, he needs this, it’s the light at the end of the tunnel, the one she’s not ever sure she’s going to reach for herself.

They stay silent, just listening. Tears float over her cheeks but they don’t hurt and she can tell by the little hitch at the end of every breath that he’s crying too. Something close to an hour passes, then she hears a cry on his end and Julie calling his name. 

He calls back but waits on the phone for another breath, then says, firmly, “I love you, Tess.”

She knows what he means. That over the past two decades he’s loved her in every way language knows to quantify and the hundreds of thousands more that are indescribable. That _his_ wife and _his_ daughters do nothing to lessen everything he’s always felt about her and _their_ son. The thread that ties them together isn’t skating anymore.

“I love you too.” She whispers.

They both hang up.

 

“Now, this isn’t one hundred percent, it’s still a bit early, but I’ve got a pretty good look here if you want to know the gender.” 

“Yes!” Scott bounces to his feet like a gold medal win and Tessa laughs, pulling at his arm to get him back in the chair beside her. The ultrasound technician smiles at them, warm and effusive. 

Scott settles back down and wraps his arm around her shoulders. “Sorry. Yes-“ he looks at her, she agrees with her eyes. “Yes, we would like to know the gender.”

“Well then.” The technician adjusts the wand on Tessa’s stomach and it still more than anything just feels _weird_. They both watch the grainy screen that only sort of, sometimes looks like a child to Tessa. “Say ‘hi’ to your new baby boy.”

“Wow.” Scott says, then he’s crushing her into a hug, pulling half her upper body off the exam table. Her shoulder presses hard into his chest and her arms are at all the wrong angles but she holds him back the best she can.

“We have a son,” he whispers, his breath flutters the hair around her ear and his nose presses into her temple. She presses back. The heartbeat, _his_ heartbeat still echoes around the room.

“We do.”

 

Tessa meets Marcus at a sponsorship event in Toronto when Julie’s three months along and she thinks she should probably stop codifying her life by someone else’s pregnancy. He’s got dark, slick hair, a smile that effuses charm, and the brightest, clearest blue eyes she’s ever seen. 

He’s a man who knows _exactly_ how attractive he is, she can see it in his posture, and his eyes are all over her. 

He offers a hand. “Marcus Hayes.”

“Tessa Virtue.” She shakes his hand, it’s warm and soft, not like he spends forty plus hours in an ice rink every week. 

“I know.” He smirks and his eyes twinkle but it’s not conceited, just joking. There are several larger than life photos of her in sportswear plastered around the room. “Can I get you a drink?”

She smiles, and tilts her head just so. He’s tall, but not tall enough to be a giant next to her. “Absolutely.”

That night, she goes back to his apartment with him. The next morning, he tells her he’d love to see her again. She bites her lip, but agrees. 

 

Tessa goes to the twenty-week ultrasound with her mom because Marcus has an important meeting in Toronto. He offers to skip it, to come with her, but she shakes her head and tells him good luck. He’s been at most of the others. This one will hardly be any different. 

She has half a mind to call Scott, when she realizes she doesn’t want to go alone. They’ve been such good _friends_ the past few years, in a way she doesn’t think they’ve been since they were little kids. But she decides that it’s a can of worms that probably doesn’t need to be opened. 

The appointment is filled with more perfectly fine news. Then the ultrasound technician, a scrawny man who barely looks into his mid-twenties, tells her she’s having a girl and she starts crying. Slow, happy tears (because she has a _daughter_ ) that rapidly dissolve into hot, racing sobs (but her _son_ is gone).

The technician leaves with a gentle pat on her arm and Tessa presses her forehead into her knees, hunched over her belly. Kate rubs her back slowly while she sobs, as if Tessa were the child. It feels like ages before she can get her tears to taper off, but eventually they do and she leaves the doctor’s office feeling lighter, if emotionally drained.

She calls Scott in the car after and asks if he wants to have dinner. 

“Of course, T.” His voice is a bit too forced. She knows he just moved out of the house, that their divorce is now inevitable instead of theoretical, and he feels at a loss alone in the apartment he found. “I’ll make us dinner.”

He still knows where everything is in her kitchen. That surprises her as she watches him cook in this house, thrown back ten years. It really shouldn’t, it’s not like she’s moved anything. 

They sit across from each other at her wide wood grained table eating chicken parmesan. He’s gotten even better at cooking. She tells him as much and he admits he’s been taking a class. 

Once the plates are empty they linger at the table. The baby flutters at her ribs and Tessa smooths a hand over her belly in a way she hopes is soothing. Scott’s staring at her with this ache in his eyes, he has been all evening, and she thinks it must be because this is the first time he’s seen her _this_ pregnant. 

“It’s a girl.” She says a long moment after they lapse into silence, a whole minute of just looking at each other. 

His whole face lights up, some part of his pain breaking away. He gets up from the table and swoops her into his arms, a delicate but firm hand on her waist, the other clutching at the back of her neck. She laughs into his hair that’s gotten too long again. 

“Congratulations, kiddo.” He whispers into her ear and he doesn’t let her go. 

 

“What do you think of Thomas?” Tessa asks as they lay on the sofa one evening. He’d had his tablet out watching tape from some juniors but abandoned it in favour of snuggling. 

Scott thinks for a minute. “Thomas who?”

She laughs, quietly, threading her fingers through his hair. “No, as a name.”

He looks up and gives her a _ohh right okay_ face, then considers it a moment longer. “It’s okay.”

“But just okay?”

He shrugs. “What about Luke?” Tessa crinkles her nose to say no. 

“Danny?” Tessa offers. Scott barks out a laugh. She passes her fingers through the strands of his hair at the nape of his neck and scratches lightly. 

“His ego doesn’t need that.”

 

She goes to the rink a lot in the first few weeks of knowing. Sometimes to skate (her doctor assured her half a dozen times that it was fine this early, that even if she fell the fetus was well protected, and he’d encouraged her to stay as active as she felt able) but mostly just to watch. She feels at home there, safe, surrounded by the familiarity of ice and people who have known her so long they may as well be her family. 

Scott’s usually there as well. But she’s gotten good at reconciling the part of herself that wants to cling to him through this. She lets herself be close, to laugh at his jokes and answer the phone every Sunday, but that’s all. Their friendship has been so good and she doesn’t want to mess it up.  
On a Saturday morning she skates slowly along the edge of the boards, just watching the usual weekend chaos. She gets a couple of waves from old friends and shy smiles from the kids who know who she is, but mostly she’s left to her own devices. 

“Mells, come _on_.” She can hear Scott’s voice spill into the rink. “Kiddos, we’re gonna be late.” A parade of twin tromping follows him. As it does everywhere. 

Tessa skates over and the minute he sees her there’s a shred of relief in his exasperated expression. He shoots her a look that says _help_ and she pulls on her skate guards, leaving the ice. The twins are sitting on a bench, not looking at each other, both with their arms folded over their chests and their bottom lips stuck out in identical pouts. 

Scott kneels in front of one, tugging a white figure skate onto an entirely uncooperative foot. With his eyes, he points her to the big black duffle bag and she digs out another tiny pair of skates. She kneels down in front of the one she thinks is Etta. They’re still pretty identical, but she likes to think that she knows them, at least a little. 

“Hey.” She says, tugging open the laces. 

A small smile cracks the pout in front of her. “Hi Tess.”

“Hi Tess.” Amelia copies and Tessa gives her a smile too. Two minutes later they have their skates on and no longer seem to be fighting. 

“Go have fun, eh?” Scott pats both their backs, his mouth still pinched. 

They race out onto the ice, whatever unhappiness of the morning forgotten. Scott collapses his head onto her shoulder with a groan. She rubs his back automatically. 

“You okay?”

He sighs and picks himself up. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks T.” He nods towards them. 

She shrugs. “Anytime.”

 

Tessa wakes up frozen in pain. They were napping on a Sunday afternoon, totally normal, intertwined on the couch with soft rain pattering against the windows. Then she wakes and can hardly breathe. 

Scott. Scott. “Scott.” She gasps finally. He makes a sleepy sound against her throat, his hand flexing against her bump. 

Fear chokes her. “Something’s wrong.”

He wakes up. 

 

On February 19th she gets a text from Scott at three in the afternoon. 

_We still on for tomorrow?_

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who's been reading and leaving comments on this series, it's honestly the only reason I'm still going with this. I promise I will get back to you all eventually. I hope I'm only breaking your hearts in the good way


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